H50: Using structural elements to group links

Applicability

Description

The objective of this technique is to demonstrate how to group links into logical sets.
When links are grouped into logical sets (for example, in a navigation bar or main menu
that appears on every page in a site) they should be marked up as a unit. Navigation
bars are usually the first thing someone encounters on a page. People who are sighted
are often able to ignore navigation parts and start reading the content of the page.
Someone using a screen reader must first listen to the text of each link in the
navigation bar before reading the interesting content. There are several ways to mark up
content so that a user with a screen reader can jump over the navigation bar and avoid
reading all of the links.

Group links via one of the following mechanisms (in descending order of preference):